RYAN DRISCOLL

The exhibition takes its title from Tech Duinn, meaning “House of Donn” or “House of the Dark One;” it refers to a dwelling in Irish mythology where the souls of the dead gather before passing onward to the afterlife. Driscoll’s newest works construct a self-contained mythological system that explores the mysteries of death and the realms beyond. Frontal figures of idealised bodies rendered with a disciplined smoothness recalling academic and Renaissance painting recur across the exhibition as presiding sentinel-like forms that watch over this place.

Around them, Driscoll assembles dense constellations of symbols—serpents, flames, hybrid creatures, architectural fragments, and radiant geometries—that operate with the clarity of emblems and ground his visual language. Each painting holds a fixed image, structured through symmetry, repetition, and a tightly managed hierarchy of form and colour.

Driscoll’s work makes associative references to classical sculpture, devotional icon painting, Symbolist figuration and Romantic landscapes, absorbing these sources into a consistent pictorial logic. The central figure often asserts authority through scale and placement, while surrounding clusters of faces, attendant bodies, or ornamental systems compress the pictorial field around them.

Across the exhibition, Driscoll maintains a precise control of surface and finish. Figures are frequently rendered in monochrome, evoking marble or cast forms, while select elements—eyes, flames, or internal structures—are heightened through concentrated colour, asserting their mythological charge and situating them within an unfamiliar non-reality. Carefully controlled light and the absence of visible brushwork stabilises the compositions as fully resolved objects.

Driscoll’s cosmology, constructed through fragments of literature, observation of the real world, and invention from his own imagination, fits seamlessly into centuries old traditions of the occult and the mystical. Serpentine forms trace continuous paths through the compositions, linking figures and reinforcing a shared visual vocabulary. His articulation of this world—its characters, causes, and internal relations—suggest an ordered realm governed by a constant and eerie logic.

Ryan Driscoll (b. 1992, Corby, UK) received his BA in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Art, London. He has exhibited his work in solo and group presentations including at Soft Opening, London, UK; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; STEMS, Brussels, BE; Grimm, Amsterdam, NL; and Meredith Rosen Gallery, New York, NY. In 2018 Driscoll won the British LGBTQ+ Awards Art Initiative. He held his first solo exhibition in the United States, Sigil, at Anat Ebgi and had works in the group exhibition, Eugenics in the Garden, at Tureen gallery in Dallas alongside Louise Lawlor, Terry Adkins, and Kayode Ojo among others. Driscoll lives and works in Corby, UK.